First time novelist takes top prize at Manitoba Book Awards

Posted by Matt TenBruggencate, SCENE Writer | Monday April 29, 2013

Author Méira Cook took the top prize at the Manitoba Book Awards. (Great Plains)

I certainly didn't expect to win anything.

—Méira Cook, author

Méira Cook said she was calmly enjoying herself at the 25th annual Manitoba Book Awards Sunday evening at the West End Cultural Centre when the unexpected happened: her novel The House on Sugarbush Road won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.

"I was shaking," said the South-African born Cook, whose novel chronicling the relationship between a black family and white family in Mandela's post-apartheid South Africa is her first departure from poetry. "I certainly didn't expect to win anything."

The House on Sugarbush Road by Meira Cook (Great Plains)

Her expectations may have been kept down by stiff competition. The Book of the Year nominees included Imaging Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote by Esyllt W. Jones, which walked away with Best Illustrated Book of the Year and heavy-hitter David Bergen's The Age of Hope, which won the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction.

Kevin Mark Fournier won the McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award for his dark, supernatural novel The Green-Eyed Queen of Suicide City. It's set both in Winnipeg and the afterlife and tackles the issue of teen suicide. Fournier insisted he doesn't write for teens - he just writes novels - though he does find them compelling protagonists.

"It's an age when you're deciding who you are, when everything is important and dramatic and emotions are big," said Fournier, who is considering a followup novel. "You don't have the ironic distancing you do with adults."

At opposite ends of the career spectrum, poet Kristian Enright won both the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book by a Manitoba Author and the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer while Turnstone Press and Manitoba Writers' Guild co-founder Dennis Cooley was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

The only sombre moment in the evening's celebrations was brought by Coun. Jenny Gerbasi (Fort Rouge) who, in bringing greetings from the City of Winnipeg, both downplayed Russ Wyatt's call for the elimination of Winnipeg Arts Council grants and called on Winnipeggers to defend arts funding.

"It's important for everyone to be vigilant," Gerbasi said.

Full list of winners:McNally Robinson Book of the YearThe House on Sugarbush Road by Méira Cook, published by Enfield & Wizenty, an imprint ofGreat Plains Publications

Aqua Lansdowne Prize for PoetryThe Politics of Knives by Jonathan Ball, published by Coach House Books

Best Illustrated Book of the YearImagining Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote, by Esyllt W. Jones, design by Doowah Design, published by University of Manitoba Press

Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Warehouse Journal Vol.21 edited and designed by Nicole Hunt and Brandon Bergem, published by the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Architecture

Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First BookSonar by Kristian Enright, published by Turnstone Press

Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award The Age of Hope by David Bergen, published by HarperCollins Canada

Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-FictionCreation and Transformation: Defining Moments in Inuit Art by Darlene Coward Wight,published by Douglas and MacIntyre and the Winnipeg Art Gallery

John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba WriterKristian Enright

Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba PublisherThunder Road by Chadwick Ginther, cover design by Jamis Paulson, interior design by Sharon Caseburg, published by Ravenstone, an imprint of Turnstone Press

Lifetime Achievement AwardDennis Cooley

McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award - Older CategoryThe Green-Eyed Queen of Suicide City by Kevin Marc Fournier, published by Great PlainsTeen Fiction